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Category: Do-It-Yourself Construction

This guest post is by Gary Rogowski from the Northwest Woodworking Studio, who knows a thing about tools and how to teach others to use them. The Northwest Woodworking Studio is one of PAD’s Expert Partners, and they’re leading a hands-on tiny house construction workshop series this spring in Portland including Tiny House Framing on…Read more

A lot of DIY tiny house enthusiasts are relatively new to building, and wisely look for ways to get hands-on experience with construction in addition to education about tiny house design principles. That’s just one of the reasons we’re excited to announce the newest PAD Partner, The Northwest Woodworking Studio. They’re offering Tiny House…Read more

By Dee Williams A friend recently sent me an article from The Onion about a beaver who shifted his dam project from that of house and home to esoteric art project. She added a little note that said, “For some reason this made me think of you.” I read the article and not surprisingly, my…Read more

We’re celebrating two things today – Earth Day, and the paperback release of The Big Tiny, Dee Williams’ memoir about building her tiny house on wheels in 2004. In this new excerpt, Dee shares an example of how making thoughtful choices about your building materials can pay off in more ways than one. Having seen…Read more

A big goal of our Tiny House Basics Workshops is to help attendees design and build a tiny house that fits them, and to do it right the first time. We answer the questions people have right now, AND give them the tools and resources they need to answer the questions they don’t know they…Read more

By Billy Ulmer, author of the Life in a Tiny House Ebook. The ranks of tiny home builders are growing rapidly, so it’s easier now than ever to buy a tiny house instead of building one yourself. This is great, because not everyone has to, or should, build a tiny home themselves – just as not…Read more

Have you ever had an idea so exciting that you wanted to drop everything to work on it, but you wondered if it would be worth it in the end? Macy Miller is a young architectural designer who found an opportunity to make her professional and personal passions overlap. She literally dreamed up a very…Read more

While tiny houses are getting more and more coverage in the media, it’s still difficult to find an opportunity to go inside and tour one. This is a shame, because like any space, you’ve got to be inside it to really know what it’s like. A picture is worth a thousand words, but an experience is…Read more

How do you start building a tiny house? Ideally, by building a few other things first. Continuing our series of excerpts from her new memoir, The Big Tiny, Dee Williams shares some of her own tiny house building process: “A few days ago, I spent almost an hour trying to recondition an oscillating fan that I…Read more

By Dee Williams Many tiny housers are freaked out by the idea of having to deal with a city or county inspector, and they can’t fathom the courage it would take to walk into a planning office to discuss codes. So they build their little house as best they can: reading several books and…Read more

This past weekend, Dee Williams and the PAD crew held the Casa Pequena Tiny House Building Workshop at the Casa Verde Earth Day Festival in McMinnville, Oregon. Workshop participants got hands-on experience building and expert instruction on the construction issues specific to tiny houses, and festival-goers were introduced to the tiny house world as a…Read more

At PAD, we get a lot of questions about tiny house trailers – the foundation of your little house. Some popular questions include, “Which tiny house trailer should I buy?” (our answer: Iron Eagle!) and “Can you buy a used tiny house trailer?” Whether you’re planning to buy a new or used trailer, consider the following:…Read more

By Dee Williams There’s a lot of confusion out there among aspiring tiny house builders and buyers about whether they can work with conventional building codes to make their tiny house on wheels legal to live in full time. Are there building codes for tiny houses on wheels? What about zoning regulations? Is there any way…Read more

By Dee Williams I had a chance to meet with a group of high school students today at St. Helens High School in St. Helens, Oregon. For the past few years, their teacher, Joe Mauck, has been teaching students how to frame, sheath, plumb and wire tiny houses – skills that they can easily transfer…Read more

We Are PAD

We want you to build the life you dream. Whether it's a tiny house on wheels, a cottage in the backyard, a van with a plan, or a community of friends, we inspire and connect people with the know-how they need to create a home that supports the life they want to live.